Orange County Business Journal: Rancho Mission Viejo on High Alert for Prevention
RANCHO MISSION VIEJO — This 23,000-acre community, hailed by the developer as Orange County’s last frontier of development, has a giant problem — it sits in the middle of a high fire hazard zone.
Given recent disasters that have befallen Pacific Palisades, Alhambra and other communities, fires are top of mind for any buyer or renter in California.
Developer Rancho Mission Viejo LLC has made prevention of fires the key element to planning of its namesake community, scheduled to have 14,000 homes and 5.2 million square feet of commercial space when completed in the coming 15 years.
“We’ve been worried about fires for a long time,” Rancho Mission Viejo President Jeremy Laster told the Business Journal.
“We’ve implemented lots of measures to harden our communities with more drought-tolerant but fire-resistant landscaping. We have open areas that allow the embers to bypass the dense fuels. We’ve tasked our planning teams with coming up with designs that are the most fire retardant possible.”
The developer’s efforts have become noteworthy. Seth Milliman, a global consultant and compiling firm that conducts research for about 70% of the nation’s major insurance firms, is using Rancho Mission Viejo as one key model for other residential communities to follow.
The study, published on Nov. 7, highlights how a series of severe wildfires in California since 2017 has increased insurance rates and reduced coverage for property in high-risk areas. The study aims to more accurately reflect risk reduction efforts—such as fire-resistant vegetation management and community design—when determining insurance eligibility and pricing.
“Rancho Mission Viejo has many of the features that you’d like to see to prevent fires,” said Dave Winnacker, a former fire chief who helped co-found XyloPlan, which did the modeling for Milliman’s report on Rancho Mission Viejo.
“Rancho Mission Viejo has all the hard parts in place” like wide streets and buffer zones, he told the Business Journal. “They are in good shape.”
The California Board of Forestry is finalizing a regulation called “Zone Zero” that likely will allow the nation’s insurance companies to remove existing or upcoming wooded trees when they’re likely to be exempted. It will apply within one year to new construction in “Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones” and within three years for existing structures.
Once it’s adopted into the insurance risk rating, “Rancho Mission Viejo will be an ‘A’ top shelf” for fire protection, Winnacker said.
